


Remember Who You Are

by frozensight



Series: Sound the Bugle [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brainwashing, Gen, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 23:33:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2044395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozensight/pseuds/frozensight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn't know who he is, who he should be, or who he wants to be. (Directly post-TWS)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remember Who You Are

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a short little coda thing I wrote to go with the fic I wrote about Steve suffering from PTSD after TWS. I just kind of wanted to write from Bucky's POV, but I didn't want to delve too much. This is the result of all that.

He stays in the city long enough to sneak his way into the museum with the Captain America exhibit. He found it when looking up information on his last mission, but hadn’t deemed it relevant before.

Now it feels like it’s the last connection he has to some semblance of sanity. It’s the only thing about himself—or who he thinks he’s supposed to be anyway—that doesn’t immediately leave a taste of lies in his mouth. The man—Captain America, Steve Rogers, former agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and survivor of WWII—had called him Bucky. The information plaques in the museum call him Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. His handlers had called him the Subject or the Patient, while his marks knew him as the Winter Soldier.

All these names are available for use, but he doesn’t know which of them he wants to be. He has been a killer for so long, but only because it is all he knows, well… _remembers_. Everything else had been erased—is it possible for him to become something else? Something more like what the man known as Steve Rogers seems to believe he could be?

He memorizes everything the museum exhibit has to offer before he sneaks back out. It’s a free museum, but he’s gained an aversion to security—it’s not a memory per se, more like instinct. He walks around the Mall, processing everything that he’s just read, wondering how it fits into who he is currently or who he might want to be. He’s not sure he’s capable of things like wants and desires anymore. He thinks about the basic needs—food, water, shelter—and little else. This new hunger to find out information about this Sgt. Barnes isn’t something he’d ever been trained to deal with. Before it had always been wake up, memorize target, neutralize target, and go back to sleep.

He finds himself stopped outside of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s crowded, like most national landmarks during the summer, so he doesn’t go up the steps to see the statue. Instead he walks around the building in the grass until he’s at the back, where it’s just him and the cars on the street below. The sun bounces off the Potomac that swims underneath and beside the roadways, and he can’t help but stare directly into the shimmering light on the water.

He remembers pulling the man out of the river after the crash. He saved him even though he’d been the mission, the target, the mark, the _enemy_. A word writhes in his gut—a word that he’d long since stopped using—but it churns at the thought of the man, of Steve Rogers. _Friend_. It for some reason feels right to associate that word with Rogers instead of any variation of its antonym.

After a final look at the river, he leaves, and begins his journey out of the city. It has nothing left for him, and considering everything that went down when the helicarriers did, there is no one left for him to answer to either. He’s on his own for the first time in God knows how long.

He has ideas, faint notions, of where his brain thinks he should go—of places that might hold further clues to who he is or was. He decides to explore his options. He’s been kept in line for so long, ordered to kill people—some of who probably didn’t deserve it—and now he’s free to make his own orders.

He orders himself to find home.


End file.
